My family gathered tonight, celebrating a birthday that actually happened last week, and as it was going on, someone said to the birthday individual, “Enjoy these times, they’re your glory days.”

And that got me thinking.

I would imagine if any of us were asked when our glory days were, we’d love to honestly answer, “They haven’t happened yet.” But in truth I think past a certain point that ceases to be reality and becomes wishful thinking. (Nothing wrong with optimism!)

So I was pondering when my glory days might have been and I hit upon the first five or six months after I turned eighteen. I know partly it’s the rose-tint of hindsight but life honestly was really good then. Things had been rocky for a time not long before but everything seemed to straightened out and I was happy in a way that was rarely present in the immediate past. I remember I laid in bed one morning in the still-darkness before I had to get up, trying not to wake someone else, and I thought, I have everything I could want right now. It wasn’t a boast, it was more an awed realization, because my life for several years had been about sturm und drang, and I wasn’t used to being able to make that statement.

And then there’s the gold-plated fact I was no longer a minor, the only condition any of us ever knew through the entirety of life itself from infancy til 12:01 AM on our eighteenth birthdays, and me, I’d at last made it to the promised land. It felt wonderfully like freedom itself. I could and did say no.

I could tally the things that were suddenly better, things like I had kicked my years’ long flirtation with eating disorders, I had a great dog, a good car, my aunt was sometimes letting me housesit for her while she traveled, no one was making me go to Sunday Mass anymore, and I hadn’t been to stupid Ireland since 1994, meaning I’d had two whole summers home with my friends, which was wonderful and new. I had school under control for the first time and there was less pressure than ever before. I was sort of in a grey area there that suited me, walking a tightrope between keeping up my grades but not getting my skull constantly pounded on by my double agent program adviser who acted like a tenth of a percent difference on my GPA was do or die.

Largely, then, I even felt at peace with my mother. I was happy with my family, I had even been hired by a noteworthy employer with the promise of interesting work lying ahead, and they were paying me for doing almost nothing at that point but talk to psychologists, take aptitude tests…and, um, give them lots and lots of blood samples. Hmm. But, yes, I, the poor cousin in a rich family, at long last had a little money of my own, plus I was of age so I could mostly do as I wanted.

Arising from that last part, I was also surely the only senior in the history of my conservative high school who was living in sin full-time with a man in his twenties.

Top that if you wanna talk glory days.

I had also about that time decided to write a novel called The Rise and Fall of Oscar Wilde, and since I figured Wilde owed me something considering the number of times I dedicated the rosaries I was forced to pray to lifting his scarlet self out of Purgatory (he became a Roman Catholic on his deathbed in Paris, shortly before muttering the best final words ever spoken, “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.”) I even one morning, cold and bored in school chapel, kind of said a sideways prayer to him to the effect of, “Hey, ya big queen, how about gifting me a little of your Irish wit for my English exam today?”

At that second, above the drone of the priest’s homily, I distinctly heard this lilting crisp voice chirp in my head the reply: “How utter!”

And just like that an idea for my composition hit me: How Fashion Defined History. Why whoever could forget how stylish the Nazis looked all the way down to their jackboots, or how Henry VIII managed to look manly in poofy sleeves? Would Jane Austen’s Regency belles have been nearly as winsome if their dresses had waists? My essay included the line, “Divas must be great b itches lest they lose all intimidation.” (Though I changed “b itches” to “drama queens” so I wouldn’t get suspended three months before graduation.) I ask you, could I have written a line like that? No, I was channeling Oscar Wilde!

Well I got a 99% on the exam, so, what more proof did James Randi’s million dollar challenge need that a ghost heard me and replied? LSS somehow they found a loophole and didn’t pay up….or even write me back. (It was worth a try.)

Wilde, though, is someone who has always fascinated me, a flawed genius so arrogant he refused to flee to France to save himself prison time when the magistrate cut him some slack after his conviction for wanton buggery, yet whose humility leaks out in De Profundis as I think it does nowhere else in our language under the pen of any other writer. He was a man who fell from a celebrity boastfully excusing his own conduct with the quip, “The world loves the saint but Christ loves the sinner” to becoming the broken figure who in late life said, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

I got about forty pages into my novel and realized I was drifting into being a little (porno)graphic in the oral sex depictions between Hoscar and Bosie (yet Wilde was a man who did say love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling) and grew frustrated when it wasn’t the tone I wanted, but one thing I did feel cool with was this character I totally invented, this sociopathic penniless homosexual aristocrat, poor member of a rich family (something I knew about, as you may recall) who jealously stalked Wilde. I began to like him so much the entire novel threatened to shift onto him and in time he was the one part I felt was any good, so I scrapped the manuscript but later wrote a short story with just that man in it, a vicious bastard plotting to murder Oscar Wilde at the height of his fame.

After I’d re-read it from across twenty years I saw it wasn’t bad writing for eighteen, so I put the story on a flash drive last month and was going to see if I could get someone to look at it but it sat in my purse til yesterday when I decided it wasn’t that important to me after all, and if I didn’t offer it to someone before the end of the day I’d put it out of my mind. A sort of fateful “let the dice fly high” thing.

So yesterday, before the birthday party that started off my thoughts, I was out partaking of brunch (irritating term, I know but so is “partaking”) with the family with whom my daughter and I go to church, and my relations with/within that family are so complex you’d need a flow chart to follow them, and even I am not sure of the right term in every case or what I am to everyone there---almost one of them; a godmother; a cherished friend; a living link to a memory; a hated Hell-fiend succubus who should combust very slowly at high heat---but as I sat in a big round-ish booth wondering if I should ask one of the two adults there who does not want me dead if they’d like to read my story, something else came up and I lost my opportunity.

Sometimes it is like God on High wants you to think about something, because it keeps recurring. Know what I mean? Haven’t we all had the experience of never in our lives hearing of a movie or concept or song, and suddenly you’ll just keep hearing it everywhere for no apparent reason? Read Carl Jung if you’d like to go deep into the theme.

Okay, so I was out with those people deciding whether to mention my 1997 story, and in that family is one of my closest friends and she said something to the effect that, “If I was a battery in The Matrix, I’d want to be stuck in the time when I was happiest.”

Her father asked her when that was, and she said, “I dunno, maybe about senior year in high school, back when everything was still great for us.”

Considering her family’s history that could have been a mood-killer but somehow wasn’t so the conversation turned not at all to the story I’d been a second away from mentioning, and not even so much to her senior year, which would’ve been about twelve months before my own, but to when everyone there was having personal good times (backpacking through Europe in the early ‘70s; working toward the 1996 Olympic trials; the second half of my senior year; envisioning Evelyn getting smashed by a falling satellite in the parking lot, uh, that same day), and then it was asked, were they really so good or only seemed that way, and would we truly want to relive them?

All that arose as a subject a day before the “glory days” comment at tonight’s birthday party which now seems strangely foreshadowing.

I guess I should not read too much universal significance into that convergence, it’s not like it’s THAT odd for the topic of glory days to arise from a woman looking at forty this year, or at an eighteenth birthday party the next evening, but somehow it did feel like the universe was wanting me to pause and reflect on the topic of good times, and it felt like one of those moments when someone pulls back the fixed curtain between reality and super-reality, and there it was, a naked sign of Order, of A Greater Plan, of perhaps Divine Stage Direction amid the chaos that otherwise appears to command this dimly-lighted life.

Which leaves me asking: Okay, God, if you’re going to order the entire universe to create points of synchronicity in my path, what’s so important about me reflecting on the good first half of me being eighteen?

The first time I ever saw someone die wasn’t the first time I’d seen a dead person, that would have been at my baby brother Daniel’s funeral long before, a child version of me seated on my grandpa’s knee, my mother a composed, black-clad pseudo-statue, her beautiful face colorless and still, not even twenty-six yet and her second son in three years headed for the ground. She was unable to hold me, too stricken, not entirely well, so my paternal grandpa did the honors.

My father was…away from home, nearly a scandal, that. His six-pound son lying dead, passing on mere hours into this world in his mother’s arms, and where was he? People whispered about him, asking what sort of man would not come to comfort his family at such a time? They didn’t know enough about it all to understand, as even I already did, the truth being that he almost certainly did not even know and was still looking forward to his son’s arrival a month down the road. They didn’t know either about my father’s long job-related absences, which my mother and I accepted, the restrictions, the precautions of the life he would live throughout my years of growing up, or of those imposed cautions that so readily descended by outside standards into the realm of low-grade paranoia, part of a profession all too readily glamorized but which contained in reality nothing glamorous whatsoever, a career about which I was taught early-on to mislead, and those to whom I told the truth rarely failed to disbelieve me, including priests and even my best friend. My father’s employers were everywhere, people acknowledged, yet when they actually encountered someone in the rank and file of his profession it was as if they could not encompass the stark reality that they exist and are among you.

“Don’t you want to say goodbye to him?” my grandpa asked me there in the chapel as I pressed myself up onto his shoulder to stare at the crescent of dark-attired strangers seated behind us.

“No!” I said forcefully in my little voice. “No!”

So no one made me go up, but I did see over the tiny white casket where an equally miniscule infant lay wrapped in a blanket, eyes closed, mouth pink as a rosebud, the little brother I would never have this side of paradise.

So that was death, yes, but not dying.

The initial occasion I saw the spark leave another human being, saw the body become that graceless thing it graduates to be when death catches it in its irresistible shroud, I was seventeen years old, it was April 1, 1996, a Monday, an April Fool’s Day, as it happens, and I was again in the company of my grandpa, an ardent baseball fan who would not admit to having missed an opening day in half a century, who always took pride in telling me that every spring the first game of the major league season happened right there, in his hometown.

He’d ask, “And do you know why that is, Ellie?”

“Sure, because the Reds are the oldest professional baseball team in the world, so they get the honor.”

He knew I knew, he’d been quizzing me every spring for as long as I could remember.

We’d been to the big Findlay Market Parade that accompanied opening day, its route snaking from Over-the-Rhine to the former Riverfront Stadium, an almost holy ritual in a city where schools let out for the occasion and something like one family in six came down to line the streets for the parade’s two mile procession. There were clowns (scaring almost no one back then) and Shriners in tiny cars, the Budweiser Clydesdales were stomping, and the United States Marine Corps Marching Band did John Philip Sousa proud. Pete Rose, the sport’s leading hitter, disgraced everywhere but his home town, was in a lead car that advertised---what else?—Schott Buick. As he passed each street corner people yelled to him, “You deserve to be in the Hall of Fame, Pete!” And Rose would look toward those people and wink, a cocky sunovagun but heck, they loved him, he was one of their own, a boy from the humble west side who’d made good as no others of their numbers ever had.

On Opening Day in the American Heartland what darkness could possibly arise from beginnings like those?

Grandpa was acquainted with people in the Reds organization and the result was he had gotten us good seats for the game, behind home plate and little to the right, about a third of the way to first base, maybe ten rows up, close to the Cincinnati dugout, close enough to see the facial features of anyone standing at the plate. We were there early, the weather was perfect for baseball, the organ was playing, the crowd was ready, vendors were hawking their wares, in a German town so many beers were available, a buzz filled the ballpark (itself now gone, replaced by a better facility, though not one with half the meaning to locals), and I was impatient. Baseball….bored me, to be honest, still kind of does, and were it not for the fact I was spending time with my grandpa I would have been carrying a book to read, probably A Canticle for Leibowitz, which enthralled me that spring. Grandpa had taken my cousin and me to see a World Series game in 1990, something I treasure more in hindsight than I likely did at the time. Now I am so glad I went.

Am I glad I was there that day, though, April 1, 1996? I guess, but…..

At long last things got underway, Air Force jets from Wright-Patterson flew overhead, the national anthem was played and back then I think darn near everyone stood for it. The teams were introduced, the stands roared for the hometown team, and lastly the umpire came out and tipped his hat to the crowd. He was a large-statured man named John McSherry, and I admit I didn’t pay him much attention, though later I often thought of that moment, since in a very few minutes Mr. McSherry would lie dead in front of all 60,000 of us, spared no humiliation in the act of his passing.

When it happened, his legs giving out, his bulk spilling forward and downward, a look of odd madness taking over his darkening face, tongue protruding, it did not make sense for a moment. I thought what? The first pitch had been thrown by a dignitary, the umpire, McSherry himself, had called out, “Play ball!” and as I remember a batter approached . Then McSherry called time out, turned back toward the dugout, as if to walk rapidly away…and fell face down.

For just an instant the entire stadium went quiet, then the noise became loud indeed, and many stood to get their money’s worth of an unexpected tragedy.

My grandpa said, “Look away, you don’t need to see that.”

I did look away, kind of, during the next few awful moments as the dying man on the ground was surrounded, as TV cameras rolled, as onlookers gawked, many taking pictures and even videos on the bread-loaf sized camcorders of the era.

I looked at my feet…then peeked down at the terrible events on the field. I gazed up at some gulls circling above, seemingly as at home on the river as on the ocean, oblivious and uncaring about what anyone was doing below.

And then I looked again and saw the poor dead man’s feet sticking helplessly out between two paramedics who had flipped him over. There was something horribly pathetic about seeing his feet like that, then I saw his face…his face for just an instant, and I don’t think I looked anymore after that.

They called off the game, only logical, though some complained, saying never had a Reds’ opening day been canceled in a streak that went back practically to the Civil War. As for me I didn’t see how anyone could have thought of playing a game under those conditions, not just out of some sort of respect but because the entire afternoon was suddenly tinted with morbid darkness. Maybe they were tougher than me, maybe I was weak, but I had just watched someone die, and that awed me and made me feel cold. I thought how just a few minutes before that umpire had walked proudly out and tipped his cap to the stands as the announcer introduced him, he had minutes to live, and now he was gone. Was he in pain even then, as he made his entrance? Was he afraid? Was he telling himself the sensation in his chest was nothing…just go on?

Grandpa and I left among a crowd that milled not quickly toward the exits, the conversation around us focusing on nothing else but what we’d all witnessed.

“That’s all we’re going to hear for days,” Grandpa predicted. “And you watch, El,” he said, “there’ll be people who will lie and say they were there today when really they weren’t.” He asked me if I’d ever heard 25% more people claimed to have voted for Kennedy after his murder than ever did in 1960. He said, “Same situation.”

Grandpa had liked Kennedy, and he didn’t like liars.

He and I trekked about ten blocks north to a place called Arnold’s, an interesting bar and restaurant which dates to about 1861, a little older than the Reds themselves, and in standing-room conditions Grandpa had a beer and got me this in-house craft cream soda that came out of an actual wooden barrel and cost an unimaginably pricey (for 1996) $4.50. He asked if what I’d seen was upsetting me much, and I said no, it was okay. (I’d have dreams about it all, of course, I was like that.) Grandpa commented that people ought to watch their weight, and I agreed they should, weight being my paralyzing post-tennis obsession, but I likewise thought for the millionth time of how people also should not smoke, and my grandpa was an incurable, unapologetic smoker.

My father was off in another city that day, again away from home when a tragedy struck, though for nicer reasons this time, preparing to watch the Kentucky Wildcats, “his” basketball team play (and win) the national title that was wrapping up March Madness, so I was staying with my grandpa til Dad got back. I kind of felt sorry for my grandpa living alone the past year since my grandma died after a series of strokes, leaving him to himself in that big old house of his, a house that had once buzzed with energy and life and which now seemed shunned, as if it was always Grandma, not he, the family came to see, as if she was the house’s very soul, taken too young, too young. At least I still came to see him.

He went into his study and smoked, I did my own things, eventually toward evening knocked on his study door and asked if he wanted me to fix us anything, and he said he didn’t care, so I threw something together but neither of us wanted to eat after the day we’d had.

He said he didn’t understand why people let themselves get out of shape and fat and I said maybe they couldn’t help it, and he said they always had a choice, they could help it, people just did what was easy.

We finally took a walk together around sunset, back to this hilltop we called the overlook, a place we’d gone together since I was very little (a place I take my own children these days) and though he was sixty-six my grandpa hiked up that hill with ease, smoking not seeming to slow him down any more than the accumulated years, and I honestly can’t remember if I noticed that he was remarkable in being able to cover that distance so well, or if I just took it as part of the way things had always been, but it was something of a feat, him in such good shape he could trek all that distance across rough terrain and reach it the same time as an athletic teenager. In retrospect I am proud of him.

From that height we watched the sun turn the sky pretty colors, and we talked up there, mentioning other times we’d made the climb together, me being so small on some of them I had to hold his big rough hand, and finally, too soon in memory, we went back before darkness turned the woods as lightless as a cave.

I said goodnight to him, kissed him on the forehead, and went upstairs to the bedroom that had once been my father’s, while he went back to his study and smoked while listening to WLW as men called in to talk sagely about the day’s tragedy, pretending they had insights, their tones of voice authoritatively self-important, therefore slightly silly, though I doubt they thought so.

Knowing I had been there at the ball park, everyone, it seemed like, called me, wanting to hear details, the more lurid the better. That’s how it is, people want to know all about something tragic, don’t they? Mostly I failed to oblige, I just didn’t want to, but I told a lot of it to my best friend’s younger brother, who was actually a close friend of mine in his own right, almost like my own brother, I erroneously thought then, a classic only-child always seeking someone to fill the role of sibling, missing the fact the kid was in lust with me (and every girl he knew). And I told all of it to my boyfriend, who suggested it might make me feel better to talk about it, so I said okay, and I did just that, even telling him about McSherry’s feet sticking out between the paramedics who rolled him onto his back, and good Lord, how his wide-eyed face was red and his jaw was gaping open so it looked like even in death he was gasping for breath.

Horrid.

It didn’t make me feel better at all to tell him all that, it made me feel sick and it messed up my dreams, just like I told him it was going to, and he said sorry. I held the phone to my ear and he held his as well and neither of us said anything else for a while, just stayed like that. We were better at meaningful silences, he and I, than anyone I’ve ever paired with since. We could speak entire conversations by saying nothing at all. It was a gift, and a useful one that particular night.

So, it was the first time I ever watched another person die, I wasn’t nearly as old as I liked to think I was, and the experience was truly awful.

Blue did clobber Moeller last night.... Derren Brown, the self-alleged British mentalist, once did an experiment wherein he placed a wallet full of money on a busy New York sidewalk, and it was picked up in seconds, but when he tried a second wallet and surrounded it with yellow evidence tape, thousands walked past over the course of hours without touching it.... My cousin went into a famed/infamous brothel in Amsterdam and told me a huge neatly-painted golden sign hung just inside the place that read: "We Are Not For Sale, Our Time Is.".....

Sitting decreases sperm counts, likely because of the increase in heat to that region, resulting in lowered rates of spermatogenesis.... I once got yelled at in school for cleaning up a broken mirror.... The neutral site where last night's football game was held should've been called Methville.... Elevators are supposedly the safest method of travel ever devised, surpassing airlines, yet my godson cannot be dragged onto one, surprise, surprise.... Came back from lunch yesterday in a good mood and then I got the news this eighteen-year-old girl I knew through my cousin had cut her throat with a razor blade. That was the first report but it turned out she'd more like cut her neck, but still, you know? She's alive.... I once wrote a story that is half stream of consciousness. Anyone wants to read it, let me know....

Last night I passed up a chance to hear Wallace Shawn speak in order to go to a high school football game, and this morning I got an email from me from ten years ago with the subject line b***h Slap Inside For Wrong Priorities, Future Self.... My dancer/gymnast friend I went with last night kept spinning on her toes. Not the ball of her feet, her toes, making her my hero.... I had a dismal thought yesterday that had Elvis lived he'd have become an obese Howard Hughes-like recluse and that dying at forty-two was actually a better option for his legacy.... In the summer of 1977 if my mother had turned around and gone home on schedule when she was out walking with her fussy littlest sister, or if my father not been racing his ten-speed with his friend to get ahead of schedule on his summer bike trip around Ireland, trying to reach this pre-arranged stopping place a half-hour ahead of some other guys who were farther back, my parents never would have met, since it came down to a matter of a few oddly intersecting minutes... Rabbits should not eat carrots!... They never showed the upstairs rooms on Family Ties, and that used to drive me crazy as a kid.... Most bears are herbivorous via necessity...

Victorians English people were thought to be on average more sexually active than modern-day English people... I try to limit the amount of hand-me-downs my youngest gets from my oldest since she deserves her own clothes... Nature tries to give us a clue about danger through the eyes. Robins have friendly eyes, dolphins have friendly eyes, sharks and rattlesnakes do not, neither did Rasputin.... I have a tin of Earl Grey tea from the 1960s in my kitchen, and I would like to try it but then it'd be gone.... If you eliminated cat videos and ASMR from YouTube I bet the site would lose at least 1/20th of its content....

I've noticed you can find some excellently dated products if you get down and look on the floors under grocery store shelves.... A couple weeks ago I told my father huge news, something I'd kept mostly to myself for twenty years, and he wasn't mean about hearing it, but he'd mostly guessed ages ago and just never said....

I have not used plastic grocery bags since 2008 since I have this peculiar paranoia one of my children could get suffocated in one.... I am so preoccupied with what the last line of my diary will be that in case I die suddenly I always have one line in the next day's entry, which I roll forward each day. Hopefully it'd make me sound prescient and everyone will be like, "How'd she know???!!!" since that last line is: "It is time to draw the curtain upon my life.".... When I was young I used to be perplexed with how two people who had been intimate with one another could ever look at each other again.... Someday Coca-Cola will be forgotten.

captains log....provisions are low. We must venture out to hunt and gather.At this hour in the morning, there is only on place to go. The most foul and hostile of places.Wally world.Its a long and perilous journey that we must indure lest we go hungry. I would be ostracized at the very least unless grilled-cheese sandwiches are provided. The kakihara household would tear itself apart. Those pygmy savages with gnawing gnashing teeth that demand constant tribute, and if tribute is not offered, it will be taken. That is the law.

The journey begins. Over the hills. Through the woods. An endless blur of stop lights and brake lights. A small sedan behind me, following ever so close, Only to whip around me and pass by in such an arogant manner that for a moment I almost forgot about the mission. Our paths will cross again granny.

Arrival. The leviathan rises from the early morning fog and reveals itself. Massive. All powerful. All consuming. Its been waiting for me, its been waiting for all of us. Theres no time for fear. I must go in. Into the depths of a chinese hell.

Enter. The doors open before me. seducing me. The tortured screams and howls of low prices are deafening. My eyes are assualted with flourescent lighting. A sea of office supplies, computer desks,towels and cookware.

Into the bowels. Past the skinny-jean goblins. Past the 2 for 5 David Spade/Wesley Snipes combo dvds. Around the obese demons on motorized carts and their litter of hellspawn. Through the isles of toilet paper and past all of the poor lost souls forever doomed to wander the labyrinth of hello-kitty notebooks and power-ranger underwear. Am I also doomed to the same fate? Have I been foresaken? Will kraft singles not spare me?

Get up! Get up, you fool! You have to make those sandwhiches, The free world depends on it! Just a little further. There!I see a part-skim low-moisture light.Is it...?Its her! At last! Ive found her!Hold on mozzerella, lets get you out of here.

I just feel like the world is f**ked and I dont care. Worship Trump. Suck his dick. Build a wall-mexicans built your towers.. Bomb Korea. Make sure you suck Putin's dick. Ya know-because he's laundering your money. YOU a***oleS who cant see-by now-wtf is going on? You gotta be yanking my dick. Mexicans are doing your work-I worked at Honee Bear Canning I worked with Mexicans for 30 years-so f**k you a***oles who excpect us to do your work.Yeah-this is called stream of whatever the f**k.Unless you worked at a factory for 30 years-f**k you.ER-You write on and on. Nobody will read it. Post in in spurts,ER-Nobody reads long winded posts.And blah blah blah f**king BLAH!

Sometimes I just want to beat people in the head. Sometimes I want to TRY to understand why backwoods rednecks would vote in a lying failure TV show host bulls**tter as President of the USA. What the f**k is going on? Is our country comprised of backwoods morons?Answer.-YES IT IS.

Ha, yes, I know, RC, even I grow weary of it but what if I told you they aren't always written to be read by anyone here, or that sometimes things like misspelling a name on a subsequent mention (Worhol) or mislabeling a title (Death to the Outsider) or the spaces between words (the blue clobbered post) or even the number of different languages used in a post have more meaning than they seem and a short post is not always effective for what I need? (Actually I can guess what you'd say.) And, hey, you claimed you'd read a menu if I wrote it. How my ego does fall!

And I admit, I do like to write. Read, don't read, mate, I am due a raise soon either way.

ER- continue to write as you please. I read it and often enjoy it, and Im not the only one. It takes time, I tend to ramble on when I write, because I usually cant get my point across in a few sentences. My brain starts going in many directions, Im wandering if its some kind of HDAD or ADD or something. So a lot of the time what I write something it can mutate from a rant to a screen-play to a third person account of a waking dream. Or something like that. Anyway, this thread is good place to write on and on.

Don't get me wrong-ER-I love you dear.I think your a very talented writer. I -myself-don't mind taking the time out of my life to read. I read a lot. But lots of morons won't-so your talents are lost on them-like you posted-it is a stream of observation that most won't read what you write. I think your a genius. What I wrote was an observation-not a denoucement--becuase in a vapid world of facebook and where people shorten thoughts to memes-you are a refreshing oasis in a land of morons.And excuse my spelling-I'm not good at spelling. I may be illiterate-but I'm not stupid.Bless your heart.

Ha, yes, I know, RC, even I grow weary of it but what if I told you they aren't always written to be read by anyone here, or that sometimes things like misspelling a name on a subsequent mention (Worhol) or mislabeling a title (Death to the Outsider) or the spaces between words (the blue clobbered post) or even the number of different languages used in a post have more meaning than they seem and a short post is not always effective for what I need? (Actually I can guess what you'd say.) And, hey, you claimed you'd read a menu if I wrote it. How my ego does fall!

And I admit, I do like to write. Read, don't read, mate, I am due a raise soon either way.

I have to say I love reading ER's long posts.

Logged

There is a secret song at the center of the world, Joey, and its sound is like razors through flesh.

And here's my long-winded response to what I wrote regarding ER's writing-! Most people-in this ultra information land of ours-will ignore thoughtful writing in lieu of watching vapid pretty people on TV go through the motions of an existence- ie.-the Kardashians-any pretty face with lots of money and no talent-where bards sing "n****r n****r" and couldn't play an instrument if it f**ked them in the ass -where talent is voted on a tv show judged by mediocre morons. Coach potatoes who think Honey Boo Boo is classic high art. Where a man who is f**king President cant think of a better adjective than "great" and grabs p***y as a hobby becomes president-yeah.We are a dumbed down society. Book readers are in the minority. TV is king. Mediocrity rules. Sound bites and catch phrases are the wisdom of the day. Yeah I have a problem with that.A thoughtful person will get lost in a land of morons.Donald Trump is a moron who panders to morons-and-sadly-this country is FILLED with MORONS. I don't give a f**k if I offend backwoods stupid hillbilly a***oles-they are IDIOTS. So f**k you hillbilly morons-I dont give a f**k about your interbred s**t. You wanna hate n****rs? I HATE YOU.See-were still on this stream thing-right?-I'm streaming.

Guess it depends on the quality. If movies are to be believed I've heard it's around 5k a head. To me, 5k would be a LOT of money. (Honestly, I don't think I've ever HAD that much money at one point in time.) But I suppose to others it wouldn't be.

I'm glad you made this thread-ER-because it lets me rant crazy s**tCheck this out.Most People need a God-ya know-someone to tell them to be good-or else you go to hell.But Think about it-that's the stupidest belief ever.Some guy in n the sky will punish you if you don't worship him.Really nice-such a loving "God". Not possible. Crazy bulls**t. Use your brain.A loving God He loves himself more than you. Half of the 10 commadents involve-Dont worship other gods-love me suck my dick!"An egotistical f**ker.Doing impossible s**t-because folks are afraid of death. Have fun with that.Religion was invented to control folks before cops. So-yeah-take yer bulls**t to heart.Live a lie. I don't give a f**k.